Most of us know what slumped is, and what it feels like in our body. I hear the word most often from new students when they first sit in balance – and no one sounds happy about it. I wasn’t either. My front chest, which I was used to lifting, felt disturbingly low. “Stacked” is …
Read more Are you slumped or stacked? How to tell the difference.
Okay, I’ll admit the part about the cookies is frivolous. You can also tone your abs while making wholesome soups, or chopping vegetables for stir fries, or washing salad greens. What you can’t do is tone your abs while standing in modern posture, with your pelvis forward of the line of gravity, or, for example, …
Many years ago, my husband Alan, our friend Jerome and I took a trip to our property on a northern gulf Island. We planned to stay in another friend’s cabin, while Jerome and Alan put Jerome’s cabin up on jacks and replaced the rotting foundations. We arrived, let ourselves in, and went out on the …
Most of the time, we are not aware of how we sit. Sometimes we follow a cue in a yoga class, such as, “sit on the ball points of the sitting bones,” or “sit with the pubic bone parallel to the wall in front of you.” In the case of both those cues, you will end up …
Read more Sitting bone pain: are you sitting on the wrong bones?
If, 20 years from now, I’m asked: “what did you do in the pandemic?” like many of us, I will be honor-bound to answer: I made sourdough bread. And, again, like many of us, I turned inward. Literally. For the past nine weeks, I’ve been studying my diaphragm. Yes, I already knew the broad outlines: …
Read more You’ve met your sourdough starter . . . now meet your diaphragm
Nothing conveys the vulnerability of a spine out of alignment quite like watching the vertebrae collapse. That’s why Jean Couch’s collapsing spine is one of my favorite demos of all time. Originally this riveting performance was only available on the Your Pain-Free Life DVD sold through the Balance Center. That meant you had to own the …
The first time I held a pelvis in my hands I was in Palo Alto, taking my first Spinefulness teacher training. I was also watching worlds collide. My teacher, Jean Couch, brought out a model of a female pelvis, and put it in balanced posture, with the pubic bones facing the floor. The hip bones …
Read more What I learned the first time I held a pelvis in my hands
At first they seem an unlikely pairing. Georgia LeConte, the world’s most expert teacher of Aplomb/Spinefulness, is elegant and refined, commanding when she’s teaching, quiet and low-key when she’s not. James Brown is the Godfather of Soul (aaooww!). What could they possibly have in common? True, they are both in natural balance. Check out this video …
Read more Keeping it on the one: Spinefulness lessons from James Brown and Georgia LeConte
Any casual observer, seated on a park bench, watching people walk by, might begin to ask: where did all the buttocks go? Why are our cabooses so often so flat? It seems that the gluteus muscles, the biggest in the human body, have gone into hiding. They’re the source of our forward propulsion in walking and upward …
Read more The case of the missing buttocks – it’s not all mum bum
Are you familiar with Gretchen Rubin, author of wildly successful self-help book, The Happiness Project? One of her “secrets of adulthood” goes like this: what you do every day is more important than what you do once in a while. It makes sense. Anyone who plays a musical instrument has learned that 15 minutes of …
I glimpsed this mis-aligned column while being swept along in a human stream descending the steps of the Acropolis of Athens. Happily, I was able to step out and take a picture. At that moment, all my swirling thoughts about architectural columns and spinal columns suddenly gelled. So far, I had learned that columns in …